What hardware does JOGL run on?

OpenGL Development JOGL Development
#1

Is there any listing of what video card hardware/ driver software JOGL works with? I’m writing up some “System Requirements” for my game, which is written in Java and uses JOGL. My broad brush description at the moment is that it runs fine on nVidia cards, and fairly well on the latest ATI cards but not the early ones. Most motherboard chipsets are a no go. What is the situation on Windows Laptops? nVidia chipsets work and others don’t?

My one brief test on a low end Mac laptop gave me a black screen. What Mac hardware have people been successfully running JOGL based games on?

I’m interested particularly on JOGL 1.1.1, which seems to have been round long enough to build up a history. It sounds from what Ken has been posting that JSR-231 will have a bigger hardware reach when it is done, but it’s a bit of a moving target at the moment.

#2

Personally I’ve been able to use jogl with

  • Any nvidia card I tried
  • Most ATI cards
  • Intel onboard graphics chips (915 somehting I think it was)
  • Sun XVR cards
  • 15" titatnium Powerbook with an ATI 9600 Mobility
  • Microsoft software OpenGL renderer
  • Mesa software OpenGL renderer
#3

To me it seems the JSR-231 is more ore less API-stable. The only issue I’ve seen was the renaming of a package named “utils” to “util” in the nightly builds. This should be set with the beta3 release, so I suggest trying out the JSR implementation rather than the 1.1.1.

#4

API stability is not really the issue here. It’s a question of history. What the individual user wants to know is “Will this run on my system?”. In that context, an old JOGL version that runs on 80% of systems is better than a new one that runs on 85% of systems. That is, if the old one has enough history that you know which are the 20% of systems it doesn’t run on, while with the new one, the 15% is an unknown quantity.

So my question is, what is the known history of JOGL 1.1.1? Or does Sun keep a history of what configurations JSR-231 has been tested with? That would be really useful.

#5

I’m sorry but we don’t really keep a history of chipsets, etc. that we’ve tested on. In general we aim to run on all hardware and largely consider it our bug if at least basic stuff like the Gears demo doesn’t run on a particular piece of hardware. We have tested fairly recently on chipsets from Intel and ATI with no problems. We routinely run on NVidia hardware.

To be honest with you, a lot of problems have been fixed since the JOGL 1.1.1 release. Most recently, a longstanding problem was fixed (in JSR-231 beta 3) where if you ran JOGL on a machine using the open-source DRI drivers on Linux hardware acceleration would be disabled. It’s for reasons such as these that I can’t recommend you use 1.1.1 even for the purposes of having a “known good” point. I would really recommend you port your game to the new APIs and re-test with the current JSR-231 beta implementation. At this point the APIs should be stable going forward, and we will aim to keep the JNLP extension file URL stable (although depending on how you deploy your game that may or may not be an issue). Also, if you find any problems with the current JSR-231 implementation, please report them and we will do our best to fix them. In contrast, we will not be able to make any changes to the 1.1.1 source tree.

#6

Ok, thanks Ken. I’ll aim to shift to JSR-231 before before my Early Beta release, which I hope to have out by the end of March. It would be great if it runs on some of the laptop chipsets, so many people seem to be switching to laptop only these days. Especially amongst my Mac friends.

#7

I recently did some testing in Apple’s Compatibility Labs in Cupertino on various Powerbook models and found no problems, at least among the demos that ran on those machines. Let me know what your testing shows.

#8

I am running jsr231 on both a laptop using the Radeon Mobility U1, and a desktop using the Radeon 9000. Both use linux, and both seem to work well. Ubuntu of all distributions gave me more grief than any of them, but they all work now with out of the box configurations as well as with customized settings. I have tried it on Suse 10, Slackware 10.2 with a desktop enhanced 2.6 kernel, and Ubuntu. Both computers seem to work well, I have especially been impressed with the performance I have been able to achieve on laptop with lit scenes, textures, and a bit of keyframing.

I have been meaning to install a new version of fedora, and I also have a mepis disc lying around somewhere that I would like to test it on.

I liked jogl a year ago, I really like it now!

Greg